THE CENTURIONS
S1R,—May 1 add a supporting postscript to Mr. Correlli Barnett's admirable and important letter Published last week? We are suffering, in a Peculiarly dangerous way, from the posthumous effects of Victorian meliorism, which assumed, inter alio, that men were naturally reasonable and honest, and would get more so as time went by. Only an era of unique financial and social stability could ever have evolved such notions; but their legacy still lives with us today.
How else to explain the assumption, held by a large number of educated and apparently reasonable People, that all the other chaps will play the game by our moral rules if we ask them nicely—and perhaps throw away our knuckledusters before the game begins, just to show we're in earnest? To any student of history it should be blindingly clear that Victorian ethics-in-action were a sport, and that our present-day 41achtpolitik has more in common with any period prior to the nineteenth century that comes to mind. Fine words, in fact, butter no jackboots, be they Polished black or red.
What is valuable about that Victorian legacy is the stubborn outlook it left behind, the sceptical, humane, individualistic, liberal temper that refuses to be stampeded by ideologies or emotional thinking, will not compromise its moral code, spurns claptrap and doublethink, holds to truth, hates euphemisms. Mr. Barnett has come to see that liberal humani- tarianism is itself an active ideology, which must (supreme paradox) defy its own permissive tenets when it faces a ruthless enemy. It must, in fact, be utterly intolerant of intolerance, and smash the jackboot wherever that filthy symbol encroaches on our hard-won freedom. Seen in this light les .Paras perhaps may be viewed (for all their more obvious faults) as something less than caricature villains, and your other correspondents would do well to wipe away their Krokodil tears and ponder some sober reality.
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